


The White Flowers, the Red Mouth

by goldfinch



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series, Soviet Union, War Tourism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-12
Updated: 2015-02-12
Packaged: 2018-03-11 22:56:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stalin isn’t the first dictator Daisy's seen dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The White Flowers, the Red Mouth

Stalin isn’t the first dictator Daisy has seen dead. She saw Hitler too, laid out in the garden with the back of his head blown off, Mussolini hung upside-down like a cow in la Piazza Quindici Martiri. For Hitler she’d fucked a Nazi guardsman, but for this she just takes her husband's arm. Ivan smiles, and she moves closer to let him wrap an arm around her shoulder. She's wearing a fox fur coat with the collar pulled shut but under that she's in a sundress, and it is bitterly cold. The crowd has churned the snow to brown slush underfoot. Her boots are full of water. Vampires, she's learned, have terrible circulation.

"It's the end of an era," Ivan murmurs, staring up at the hearse as it approaches. The black bulk of it is piled with bouquets of white roses and chrysanthemums, lilies and gardenias; petals fly off in the wind and go reeling against windshields and snow-damp overcoats.

Daisy picks a rose petal out of her hair, flicks it into the street. "And good fucking riddance."

Ivan smiles. Over the neat curve of his lips he's wearing a thin mustache she rather likes on him. "You're young, you don't realize it yet, but men like Stalin come along rather infrequently. He deserves a good send off."

"He deserves a pile of corpses in the Red Square," she says, and can't tell if she means as trial or tribute.

Ivan chuckles. "That too."

Daisy has killed hundreds of men in the last few years, but she still remembers the photos in the papers. The gulags in black and white, Soviet atrocities rendered in newsprint. She is still learning to be cruel. She is still learning to love life the way Ivan does, hot and fast and bloody. Most days, with the liquor and the adrenaline high of killing, with the glorious rush of blood down her throat, it is easy. Other days it's easier to remember what it was like to be human. The fear and guilt, the smallness of her existence, quiet and limited as the grey mice that lived in her walls.

Two weeks ago when they were still in England, dining on roast beef with a couple in Hyde Park for dessert, Ivan asked her what it was like to feel things. She still remembers the look on his face when he said it, cool and impersonal, as distant and unknowable as the stars, but she loves him. So she told him about that. A week later news had come of Stalin’s death - three days late, the London papers were saying, but it’s not as though that matters: this is what they do. They follow the great men and women, the war, Ivan because it’s what he does, Daisy because she wants to see the end of the thing that killed her. She can’t truly be born again until all reminders of her human life have been wiped from the earth. Stalin’s the second-to-last. There’s a three-day funeral planned at the House of Unions, a pretty little building the color of an after-dinner mint, and then they’re going to lay him next to Lenin in the Red Square, in that great ugly mausoleum, surrounded by wreathes and bouquets. 

“I met him once, you know,” Ivan says. “One of his staff members is like us. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.” He rolls the name out along his tongue like a poem, as though the sound of it is something that must be tasted. “Of course that was before the war. I don’t know if he’s even still alive.”

Daisy can see it. Can see him in the elaborate Russian staterooms, turning little glasses of vodka down his throat with a smile. He fits in better here than she does, with his Russian name and his cool demeanor, his conversations with strangers on the nature of the soul, the purpose of love. Russians, he’s said more than once, make the best vampires. 

People are going up on tiptoes, now, holding out their hands toward the hearse as it passes. Stalin’s hidden inside, but Daisy can almost see his face. She’s seen it enough in the papers: Talks with Russia Stall, etc. etc, his strong face with its big mustache, the red star, the sickle. Red for blood. She is still learning how to twist resentment into disdain, but she's getting there. First, the physical: her blood cold in her veins, her face carved stone. She will look thirty-two long after these people are dead, when even Stalin’s body, preserved to a waxy finish, has rotted away. There’s a kind of victory in that.

“Come on,” she says, into the sudden stillness when the hearse has disappeared from view, and reaches for Ivan’s hand. In Moscow, like in London, his fingers are cold. There's nothing left to look at here but the edges of the crowd, where people stand in ones and twos, miserable and cold and grief-stricken. Daisy watches them from under lowered lashes. "You know," she says, "I've not had Russian before?"

Ivan chuckles. "Well. It's never too late to try."

The streets away from the main road are fairly wide, but they’re very dark, and very quiet, and she’s gotten good at muffling people’s screams.


End file.
